Within just the last few centuries, science and technology have enlarged human
capabilities and population size until humans now take, for their own use,
nearly half of the Earth’s net terrestrial primary production. An ethical
perspective suggests that potentials to alter, or further increase, humanity’s
use of global resources should be scrutinized through the lenses of
self-interested foresightedness and respect for non-human life. Without overtly
invoking ethics, studies of the carrying capacity achieve just this objective.

Carrying capacity is an ecological concept that expresses the relationship
between a population and the natural environment on which it depends for ongoing
sustenance. Carrying capacity assumes limits on the number of individuals that
can be supported at a given level of consumption without degrading the
environment and, therefore, reducing future carrying capacity. That is, carrying
capacity addresses long-term sustainability.

World-views differ in the importance accorded to the carrying capacity
concept. This paper addresses three world-views —ecological, romantic, and
entrepreneurial— and explores the ethics and the policy implications of their
contrasting perspectives.

Environmental carrying capacity is a venerable, if hypothetical, ecological
concept that has acquired fresh currency in light of the growing human
population. It relates individuals to quantity of resources and quality of life,
so it implies limits.

Familiar to stock-growers —year in and year out, for example, it takes 30
acres to support a cow-calf unit on typical Wyoming range-land —the concept of
carrying capacity in the modern context refers to the number of humans who can
be supported without degrading the natural, cultural and social environment.
Exceeding the human carrying capacity implies impairing the environment’s
ability to sustain the desired quality of life over the long term. The
appropriate comparison is to a too-dense cattle herd that finds sufficient feed
for several years, but at the cost of over-grazing so that the land’s future
yield is reduced to below the original level.

The concept of carrying capacity is widely discounted, in part because it is
fluid and virtually unquantifiable. Past discoveries and technological
breakthroughs have, many times, raised carrying capacity, and much western
science encourages the belief that technology’s potential is unlimited.
Technological optimists typically reject scientific warnings that no substitutes
exist for topsoil, fresh water, clean air, and the "free services" of
many species, or that technology and its deployment to replace existing uses of
petrochemical energy will take 20 years to bring on line, minimum. The standard
answer to evidence that a non-renewable resource is being depleted, or a
renewable one degraded, is that, if a resource becomes "scarce" or
pollution too detrimental, prices will rise sufficiently to call forth either
substitutes or innovative technology that overcomes the problem. Technology and
market mechanisms, it is said, will always enable humans to overcome putative
natural limits.

Economic cornucopians point to low (even falling) prices for essential
commodities and staples, arguing that they give no sign of impending scarcity.
Economic pricing theory is conveniently ignored, although this suggests that a
purely competitive market —which describes many agricultural sectors— as
opposed to a monopolistic market often induces producers to go on producing
regardless of price signals. Pure competition may, indeed, promote increased
production as a strategy for maintaining a constant income stream in the face of
declining prices.

Oil production in the late 1990s, when a barrel of oil was priced at
approximately $10.00, exemplifies the price and production effects of relatively
pure competition even when the resource in question is actually limited.
Producer countries in the mid-East are dependent on oil revenues to maintain the
various consumer subsidies to which their populations have become accustomed. In
the face of low prices, production surged in order to maintain the needed
revenue. Only when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
re-exerted production caps did prices rise. The leaders and the citizenry of
industrialized countries seldom interpret the higher price of oil or natural gas
as a sign of scarcity. Many remain convinced that prices are arbitrarily
manipulated. The production quotas set by oil producing countries are not seen
as sensible responses that have much to do with knowledge about the limited
quantity of the underlying resource.

Mixed evidence often leads to rejecting the concept of carrying capacity,
possibly because it is reassuring —inherently more pleasing— to believe that
humanity has escaped from limits that constrain the growth of all other species.
Moreover, much in western history warrants such confidence. For example, in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, just as the United States’ eastern
forests were about depleted, crude oil was discovered and put to multiple uses
formerly met by wood fuel.

Ecologists, partisans in the ongoing debate, not only assert that limits to
essential resources and the threat of both local and global pollution are
apparent already, but also warn of a threshold effect. They point out that a
boundary condition can be encountered suddenly. Simplistically, a person jumping
off a forty-story building might enjoy the ride until brought up short by the
landing. A standard requiring total certainty —such as the landing— carries
a risk. This risk is that proof of the carrying capacity’s being exceeded may
come only after much damage —and perhaps irretrievable damage— has been
done.

If optimistic forecasts are wrong and a natural threshold is crossed, the
consequence could be calamitous. Nevertheless, proof sufficient to convince
skeptics remains elusive. Many experts and opinion-makers contend that most
difficulties are temporary, requiring only the right fix. The inexactness of
carrying capacity models encourages that perspective. An exact limit for a local
population is rarely if ever established.

Yet, population studies in human and other animal populations repeatedly show
that exceeding this uncertain limit, the carrying capacity, results in
catastrophic change. When do problems start to be seen as intractable? When does
the perceived cost of being wrong about unlimited technological potential
outweigh the perceived cost of being wrong about limits where none, in fact,
exist?

Disagreement about the theoretical validity of conceptualizing and
estimating ecological limits, and its practical ramifications, is only the
beginning. Attitudes toward limits can be expressed in different realms,
becoming virtually an existential issue. One major philosophical tradition
denies limits to humanity’s moral capacity. The divergence in schools
of thought reaches into policy.

In mid-eighteenth century France, controversy over limits hinged on human
moral capabilities. Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire dramatized the conflict of
worldviews in Candide. Early in the plot, a trusting Pangloss confidently
reassures Candide that they are living in the best of all possible worlds.
Ultimately, a world-worn and soberer duo settle for improving their own
backyard, "Cultiver son propre jardin."

Opposed to Voltaire’s eighteenth century rationalist view were the
romanticists Jean Jacques Rousseau and Condorcet in France and William Godwin,
father of Mary Shelley, in England. Central to their belief was the imagining
—untroubled by modern archeology— of the uncorrupted "noble
savage" of the Americas, which ostensibly proved to their satisfaction the
(re)perfectibility of man and of society in the context of living harmoniously
with nature.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century controversy about physical limitations
was concerned less with absolutes than with the balance between
population and resources. A maelstrom swirled around Thomas Robert Malthus,
whose famous first edition of his essay on population was published on June 7,
1798. Malthus argued that most humans would reproduce up to, or even surpass,
the limit of resources available to them.

The Malthusian observation invites the conclusion that most people find
sustained prosperity elusive, because technological progress or other addition
to wealth stimulates population growth. This growth eventually restores the
original ratio of resources to people.

Malthus is remembered for the elegance and force of his argument; however,
the essential element of his thought had been anticipated. Writes ecologist
Garrett Hardin, "Two thousand years ago Koheleth, the Preacher, said in
Ecclesiastes 5:11: ‘When goods increase those who eat them increase.’"
Similarly, "the English philosopher David Hume, in 1752, played a variation
on the theme in Ecclesiastes: ‘Where there is room for more people, they will
always arise’" (Hardin 1998a). Malthus, a theologian and political
scientist, surely knew both sources.

The conflicting worldviews on limits to both resources and human moral
capacities descend to the present. The taxonomy proposed here identifies three
patterns and is admittedly an oversimplification. But a division into ecological,entrepreneurial, and romanticist traditions —loose
classification though it is may partially illuminate present-day political and
issue coalitions that might otherwise seem mystifying.

The entrepreneurial tradition relies on individual initiative and contractual
relationships for the betterment of mankind and society, and is mainly skeptical
of the moral perfectibility of human kind. In the tradition of John Locke, it
assumes that pursuit of private ends can serve the common good because the
incentive to increase personal property often results increasing the total
wealth that a society may ultimately enjoy. Proponents are pragmatists and,
often, self-styled conservatives.

The dominant motive acknowledged in oneself and generally attributed to
others is not altruism but self-interest, —as in the Declaration of
Independence’ guarantee of the "pursuit of happiness" —which is
taken to be a virtually universal human characteristic that can be socially
channeled to become usually positive in effect. Competitive self-interest
reinforced by good information and accountability is expected to yield a
well-regulated society, rational markets, prosperity founded on market
principles, and fair government. The entrepreneur advocates free trade and ample
immigration so long as these policies appear to enhance net profits.

They rely not on perfecting human moral instincts but, rather, on the social
contract for mutually-agreed governance.

The entrepreneur’s differential views of limits depending upon their
reference to moral or physical realms suggest a pragmatic rather than
ideological foundation. Pragmatists are swayed by evidence.

Technological innovations that quadrupled carrying capacity since the
Malthusian era are the basis for the entrepreneur’s skepticism that material
limits are real and close. A 1997 essay in The (London) Economist points
out that "predictions of ecological doom, including recent ones, have such
a terrible track record that people should take them with a grain of salt."
The essay continues, "…journalists and fame-seekers will no doubt
continue to peddle ecological catastrophes at an undiminishing speed. These
people, oddly, appear to think that having been invariably wrong in the past
makes them more likely to be right in the future" (Environmental Scares,
1997, p.19).

Reasonably enough, this essay appeals to the historical record. Why would the
future be different?

As the twentieth century closes, many entrepreneurs accept the assumptions
relating to technology and the physical world that have been provided, in large
measure, by Julian Simon. This is the late University of Maryland economist,
author, and editor of the rose-colored-wrapper compendium The State of
Humanity (1996) and pro-immigration tracts such as Immigration: The
Demographic and Economic Facts (1995).

Simon's premise is that limits to natural resources as well as the
environment's capacity to cope with pollution invariably yield to the
transformations made on nature by technology. Thus, natural constraints are
merely challenges, ultimately irrelevant to the economy. Technology will refresh
or give us substitutes for clean air and water, rich topsoil, cheap fossil
fuels, and Earth's services in detoxifying pollution. That is, manmade capital
can substitute for natural resources indefinitely and without end; repeated
doublings of the size of the economy and population present only opportunity.
Whatever accelerates growth should be pursued.

In 1995, a Washington, D.C. think-tank, the Cato Institute, published Simon's
nigh-incredible cornucopian assertion that "Technology exists now to
produce virtually inexhaustible quantities of just about all the products made
by nature." Extending his foray into the world of science, Simon writes,
"We have in our hands now —actually in our libraries— the technology to
feed, clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7
billion years.... Even if no new knowledge were ever gained... we would be able
to go on increasing our population forever..." (Cato Institute 1995, p.
14).

Note that 7 billion years ago was about two and a half billion years
before the first one-celled life form appeared in Earth's newly formed primal
ooze. Can one have confidence in the author of prognostications for 7 billion
years into the future?

Physicist Albert A. Bartlett of the University of Colorado is a gentleman
inclined to give adversaries the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, he was pleased
to report that Simon did not entirely mean what he wrote: "Simon said that
the ‘7 billion years’ was an error and it should have been ‘7 million
years.’" But, Bartlett continues, "It is too early to breathe
easily." Given the 1996 world population of approximately 5.7 billion and
an annual population growth rate of 1 percent, world population after 7 million
years would be equal to 2.3 x 1030410. "This is a fairly large
number!" (Bartlett 1996).

Non-mathematicians might like to know that 2.3 x 1012 is 2.3 trillion
(American definition of "trillion"). So how large is a number with the
exponent of not 12 but 30410?

The hard-line cornucopian view also has champions in Dennis T. Avery of the
Hudson Institute and author of Saving the World with Pesticides and Plastic
(1995), and Thomas Lambert of the Center for the Study of American Business
(CSAB). Lambert writes that, "natural resources are not limited in any
meaningful sense" because resources are really best understood as services.
It is, after all, "the particular services a material provides —not its
physical composition— that makes a material a resource" (Lambert, 1996,
p. 5).

While appealing in their reasonableness (unlike Simon), Lambert's and Avery's
visions deny the implications of the environment’s being an envelope around
the economy. Yet, the environment provides inputs to economic production, and
the environment receives not only the useful but also the waste products of
economic activity. As put by economist Herman Daly, "The economy is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment."

Ecologists and certain economists —for example, Daly (1990; 1991; Cobb and
Daly, 1990)— point out that technology can employ (or alter or discover) one
resource to make up for shortfalls in another, and use assorted strategies to
minimize pollution, but these expedients only change the pressure point. One
cannot avoid the risk of shortfalls or bottlenecks developing in the substitutes
and during the transformation process. Difficulty is compounded if the real
world has a propensity to develop problems in multiples, not one at a time. In
times of stress, anything that can go wrong, might go wrong. How does technology
cope with the snowball effect? "With difficulty," answers an ecologist
or old-fashioned conservative. And, "Why take the risk?"

Since mid-century (Cottrell, 1955), growing numbers of scientists have tried
to make the public aware that the large increase in carrying capacity has been
possible only because of readily available fossil fuels, especially oil. Walter
Youngquist (1997), Colin Campbell, L.F. Ivanhoe, Richard Duncan and others
suggest that a peak in oil production in the vicinity of 2005 to 2015 A.D. will
be followed by steady decline. Natural gas is expected to be plentiful for about
40 years after the peak in oil production, and new processes are likely to
increase its versatility. Without fossil fuels, it would probably be impossible
to farm the vast acreage that has made possible the present population size.

In November, 2000, geologist Richard Duncan addressed a Geological Society of
America "summit" held in Reno, Nevada. Citing historical data, Duncan
shows that world energy production per capita grew by 3.45 percent
annually between 1945 and 1973; growth slowed to 0.64 percent annually from 1973
to 1979; then growth ended and began to decline at the rate of 0.33 annually
from 1979 to 1999. Fitting a mathematical equation to data points on this curve,
Duncan derives projections which suggest that, by 2030, energy production per
capita will fall back to its 1930 value. This scenario envisions rolling, then
permanent, blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks, worldwide.

Industry geologists are sanguine regarding the quantity and substitution
possibilities for natural gas and other energy sources and do not yet state
publicly that a peak in oil production is imminent. Nevertheless, more
pessimistic forecasts are gaining ground (Banks 1998), and the Paris-based
International Energy Agency (IEA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) stated in 1998, for the first time, that "the peak
of world oil production is in sight" (Kerr 1998). Were the majority to
adopt the views of Campbell and others, entrepreneurial assumptions about limits
might be readily reversed.

The habit of inductive reasoning makes entrepreneurs open to new
perspectives. Sustained sharp price increases for essential commodities, rising
public costs (higher taxes) associated with a rapidly growing population, and
fees for the formerly-free services of nature would be persuasive to those of
the entrepreneurial bent. Many who reject ecological statistics would be weaned
from the conviction that wealth is both abundant and renewable by market and
financial signals.

Contrasting with the pragmatism of the entrepreneurial sector, the
romanticist tradition appears to be driven by ideology. Denying limits in all
realms, romanticists assert an unlimited human moral capacity to do right. While
conceding that some people go wrong, romanticists explain that humans are not
expected to reach their full moral potential under impoverished or mean social
conditions.

The development of true altruism —not mere reciprocal altruism— is
the highest moral trait in the romantic pantheon, but it requires nurturing love
and a sufficiency of goods. Thus, the theoretical perfectibility of humanity and
human society carries a caveat regarding requirements for a supportive social
and economic milieu. These presumptions are the source of advocacy for social
reform and government regulation aimed at redistributing wealth in order to
overcome deprivation.

Given that it is society’s obligation to rehabilitate the less fortunate so
that every potential for human perfectibility is actualized, it becomes
axiomatic, for romanticists, that society can do it. The means exist.
Romanticists trust that nature can provide without limit because, if the goal
that all humans should have access to sufficient resources is to be realized,
that is clearly necessary.

In the romanticist formulation, therefore, the ecologists’ concept of
carrying capacity is irrelevant, if not malevolent, because it sets an upper
limit to the resources that ever can become available to humanity. Lest moral
potentials not be fulfilled, social reformers are constrained to believe in
boundless wealth that need only be equitably distributed in order to create the
perfect society.

Independently, Garret Hardin has arrived at a similar analysis of the
romanticist worldview. He cites in evidence Karl Marx’s unprovoked ad
hominem attacks on Malthus (in the vein of "‘superficial,’ ‘a
professional plagiarist’"). Hardin suggests that "a single
overarching view accounts for these and many other invectives put forward by
Marxists and liberals during the past century and a half: this is their tightly
held denial of limits in the supply of terrestrial resources. Friedrich Engels,
Marx’s collaborator and financial supporter, asserted baldly that ‘The
productivity of the land can be infinitely increased by the application of
capital, labour (sic), and science’" (Hardin 1998b, p.182).

The romanticist tradition is manifest in modern times among those who strive
to advance internationalist and collectivist agendas. They believe in breaking
down national boundaries because nation-states perpetuate disparities in wealth.
University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum exemplifies the tradition in her
teaching that "the concept of national citizenship is too exclusive and ‘morally
dangerous.’ Justice and equality, she claims, require ‘allegiance to the
worldwide community of human beings’" (Erasing Self-Rule 1998, p.16).
Romanticists support behavior and international institutions that tend to erode
sovereignty.

Some who appear to favor world government try to deflect objections by
asserting its inevitability. Joe De Courcy observes that, "On 17 February
1930, for instance, a leading member of the Council on Foreign Relations, James
P. Warburg, told a U.S. Senate Committee: ‘We shall have world government
whether we like it or not...by consent or by conquest.’ In 1976, Professor
Saul Mendlovitz, director of the World Order Models Project, said there is
‘…no longer a question of whether or not there will be a world government by
the year 2000.’" The stealth strategy is preferred by former Senator Alan
Cranston (D-California), past president of United World Federalists. He
"told Transition, a publication of the Institute for World Order,
that: ‘The more talk about world government, the less chance of achieving it,
because it frightens people who would accept the concept of world laws’"
(de Courcy 1998, pp. 34-35).

The ecological tradition is in almost all respects the opposite of the
romantic-internationalist. Ecologists are strongly influence by biology and many
emerge from this academic discipline. Their views are formed from observation of
natural systems, including behavior; that is, their method of reasoning is
inductive, like the entrepreneur, although the two traditions attend to
different data sets.

In a commons, in fact, the better individual strategy is
to use the resource as intensively and fast as one can. The maxim is,
"Use it or lose it," with a vengeance.

Ecologists accept the concept of carrying capacity as essentially
self-evident. The Earth is round and finite; so, therefore, must be its
resources and its capacity to cope with pollution (Bartlett, 1996; Pimentel and
Pimentel 1991; 1996). Further, they see the imminence of carrying
capacity limits in the deterioration of countless natural systems. Signs include
the 15 out of 17 world fisheries that have crashed; falling water tables in
aquifers; topsoil loss; annual oil production greater than discoveries
(therefore, declining real reserves); mass extinction of species; and
compromised capacity to cope with atmospheric and water pollution (Pimentel and
Pimentel 1996; 1997).

Carrying capacity has greatest relevance to policy when viewed in local
terms, because it often is not possible to affect the destiny of units larger
than the local community or, at the outside limit, the nation. Information
about the environment, including resources and vulnerabilities, is often best at
regional or smaller levels.

Further, cooperation is more easily mobilized at the neighborhood, state,
or at least national level because it often depends upon kinship or friendship
—a sense of identity and shared interests that facilitates the exchange of
favors over periods sometimes longer than a generation. In addition, the
presence of a competitor is an incentive to cooperate. Communities that are
vying with an opponent will be more likely to cooperate internally, but this
motive cannot coexist with the ethos that all belong to one world.

Finally, ecologists apply the lesson of the "tragedy of the
commons." In 1968 Garrett Hardin illuminated the essential characteristic
of a commons, defining it as a resource from which no one can be
excluded. Everyone has access to a commons.

The fact of universal access has major implications for the motivation to
conserve because conservation depends upon self-restraint, saving a resource in
order to enjoy or use it in the future. No one has the incentive to conserve a
resource to which no one can be denied access, for the reason that those making
the effort, or their descendants, are very unlikely to have much of the future
benefit from their present sacrifices.

In a commons, in fact, the better individual strategy is to use the
resource as intensively and fast as one can. The maxim is, "Use it or lose
it," with a vengeance.

Organizations with the appearance of a commons have successfully conserved or
even improved a resource, at times. But delving deeper into instances of this
type invariably reveals a mechanism for excluding users. This holds true whether
the resource is a forest, a fishing ground, or a village green for pasturing
sheep. Informal mechanisms for regulating use can be effective, if often rough
on transgressors, and the gradient of penalty may escalate. But regulation that
lacks enforceable and meaningful sanctions is unlikely to protect a resource
(Leal 1998; Ruttan 1998).

Thus, the moral hazard of the commons is the ultimate, logical reason why
one-world, a world without borders, will not get one very far into a peaceful
and prosperous future. If no person, and no community or country, can say,
"Keep out; it’s mine," then no one and no region or country has the
incentive to conserve. And that, simply, is because there is almost no realistic
hope of future benefit in proportion to one’s effort and self-restraint.

Ecologists tend to conclude that the physical capabilities of Earth and the
moral capabilities of mankind are equally constrained by natural law. Humans are
not so unlike other species that the principles of evolutionary biology would
not apply to human behavior (Trivers 1971; Dawkins 1976; Wilson 1975). Survival
and reproduction of one’s genes is the de facto evolutionary test of
success. Inevitably, behavior is shaped to increase the probability of survival.

By extension, moral codes are subject to the possibilities inherent in a
physically-limited Earth. Ecologists take into account that humans are not
generally altruistic, because altruism like other behavioral traits is to some
extent heritable, and altruists are less likely than others to leave offspring
(Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971; Wilson 1975). Behavior and culture that lead to
extinction of those who practice them cannot be moral, by definition. For
example, if wastefulness in use of resources leads to extinction, then it
cannot be moral. Nor can altruism including the sharing of resources, if
it leads to extinction, be moral (Elliott 1997).

Altruism is particularly self-destructive when applied internationally. Those
who advocate altruism must necessarily believe that nature is a cornucopia of
unlimited means.

Accepting limits in principle and in fact, ecologists advocate not only
prudence in use of resources but also discovery of motives which induce
intrinsically self-interested humans to conserve. Thus, the moral hazard of the
commons is the ultimate, logical reason why one-world, a world without borders,
will not get one very far into a peaceful and prosperous future.

If no person, and no region or country, can say, "Keep out; it’s
mine," then no one and no community or country has the incentive to
conserve. And that, simply, is because there is almost no realistic hope of
future benefit in proportion to one’s effort and self-restraint.

To sum up the ecologist perspective, given the probability of coming
scarcity, a multiplicity of logistic problems in increasing efficiency, and the
realities of human nature —including political and ethnic loyalties— many
ecologists suspect that the only practicablesolutions to most
environmental problems will be local.

The romanticist assumption that humankind and society are potentially
perfectible, needing for fulfillment only that the planet’s abundant resources
should be equitably distributed, entails a surprising array of corollary axioms.
The heirs of Rousseau and Marx advocate a world without borders, one-world. They
reject the competitive efforts of one country or region to thrive beyond the
realistic aspirations of any other. They espouse submerging national interests.

Applied to the United States, the one-world ideology is expressed in advocacy
for reducing consumption to the average of world levels (substantially lower
than present European levels of consumption) and for open borders. Part of the
rationale for the latter goal is that the United States is unlike any other
nation. It is a nation of immigrants having no history of a citizenry who feel
united as a people, and therefore it has no legitimate territorial integrity. In
short, the United States is not a nation-state like other countries of the world
but is, rather, "an idea," appropriately stripped of sovereignty.

In the cultural and social realms, this description of America justifies
accelerated immigration of peoples as unlike to existing Americans as possible,
and advocacy of multiculturalism. Already a feature of public school (embodied
in new, government-sponsored history standards) and many private school
curricula, multiculturalism teaches that all cultures are equally relevant to
America. Remarkably (and illogically within the terms of multiculturalism’s
own worldview) one culture is presented as illegitimate —destined to be
overcome by others. That is the culture of the Founders based on European and
particularly Anglo-Saxon principles of ethics, government, religion, and
Euro-American history.

Others think differently on each of these dimensions. Whether it be the
legitimacy of the nation, the sense of patriotism and kinship in being American,
the inviolability of carrying capacity if the nation is to survive, or the means
of protecting carrying capacity, ecologists begin from different premises and
arrive at vastly different conclusions.

In addition, ecologists and entrepreneurs are converging on the view that
humans are not altruists —the opposite of the romanticist credo. A factual
basis for rejecting the myth of the "noble savage" is well developed.
The current view is that altruism manifested in a conservation ethic is no more
present in traditional than modern society (Williams 1966; Ruttan 1998).

Inductive reasoning is common to both ecologists and entrepreneurs but,
focusing on different data, they arrive at different conclusions. At present,
entrepreneurs assert that the greatest good derives from free trade and minimal
impediments to the movement of labor. Attentive to natural systems, ecologists
reach a conclusion —one also having policy implications— that is based on
the limits of nature in general, and of human nature in particular.

It seems likely that the majority of ecologists and entrepreneurs (with the
exception of multinational corporations) assume that the United States is a
nation-state, like others, with territorial integrity and its own culture.
Culture is taken to mean the values and assumptions, history, language, and
technology that are largely shared by all members of the society. The government
has its primary responsibility to the nation, the United States, and a corollary
obligation to protect the nation’s people, all Americans. It would not put the
matter too strongly to assert that the government of the United States is
obliged to put the well-being of Americans above all others, just as the
governments of all other countries are expected to do for their people.

Preservation of carrying capacity, which is inherently limited, is
fundamental for the present and future well-being of any nation. Over-taxing the
carrying capacity destroys, sometimes irremediably, the long-term ability of the
resource base to sustain those who depend on it.

Population growth indubitably increases the pressure on the environment —even
romanticists admit this so long as their focus is the rest of the world rather
than the United States (see, for example, the former Vice-President Albert
Gore’s Earth in the Balance [1992]). Concern about U.S. population
growth pushes ecologists to protest present U.S. immigration policy which allows
the addition of over1 million persons annually (net of emigration), as well as
the subsequent growth from descendants of current immigrants. Immigration and
the children of post-1970 immigrant families, together, accounted for over 70
percent of U.S. population growth in the decade of the 1990s (Camarota 1999).
That share rises continuously as the stock of recent immigrants and their
descendents grows and the native-born fertility rate remains low.

Ecologists see not only the direct threat to carrying capacity from
increasing population size through immigration, but also the indirect effect
arising from immigration’s effect on the incentive system. Americans are
disposed to conserve land that they own or control, to stabilize population
through self-restraint in childbearing (the native-born fertility rate is below
replacement level), to tax themselves for environmental rehabilitation efforts,
and to mitigate ongoing environmental destruction. However, immigration makes
the United States into an effective "commons," a condition conducive
to using resources as fast as possible lest one lose out on one’s share.

A rational person who sees no prospect of stabilizing population so long as
immigration continues might well resist any sacrifice made on behalf of the
environment or society at large (Abernethy, 1993). If efforts to protect the
carrying capacity are doomed to fail, anyway, because of continuing population
growth, why conserve, why do without today, why support an environmental ethic?
A case in point, to protest continuing immigration, some Californians responded
to water-use restrictions during the 1980s drought with the bumper sticker,
"Flush Twice."

Unless reasonably assured that present and future benefit will accrue to
themselves or their posterity, few persons will forego present consumption or
childbearing for the purpose of conserving the environment. This means that
Americans’ incentive to conserve the environment can probably be maintained
only by offering hope that their efforts will not be in vain. Ecologists
conclude that reducing immigration to the number compatible with stabilizing
population size, or even allowing population decline should that prove
necessary, is the only sustainable course.

Translating worldviews into policy initiatives, partisans of the three
distinct traditions find themselves joined in surprising coalitions. When the
focus is on protecting a particular resource (a forest, a river, public lands),
romanticists work together with ecologists. Romanticists and entrepreneurs (who
desire access to the cheaper world labor market without moving production
operations abroad) readily work together to defeat legislation that would reduce
immigration numbers to a level compatible with U.S. population stabilization.

An instance of the serendipitous romanticist-entrepreneurial coalition was
their mobilization to block a proposed reduction in numbers of legal immigrants
in spring, 1996. The pro-immigration National Immigration Forum headed by Frank
Sharry and the liberal Urban League as well as the National Association of
Manufacturers and the National Trial Lawyers Association argued in concert —and
successfully— for continuing high levels of legal immigration (Davidson 1995,
p. 34; Chavez 1996; Levine 1996; Jacobs 1995; Freedburg 1996; Tech Firms 1996).
However, this coalition fragments on conservation issues.

Divisions can be found within the entrepreneurial community itself. For
example, Fred Charles Iklé, himself a conservative, takes neo-conservatives to
task for their idealization of non-stop economic and population growth:
"The fabulous success of conservative economic policies has seduced many in
our midst into taking economic growth as the defining attribute of conservatism.
These brethren now believe that...good growth can and must continue
indefinitely. They act as if conservative thought were nothing but the
philosophy of perpetual growth" (Iklé 1994, p. 36).

Warning against immigration-driven growth, conservatives might cite Lester
Thurow, former Dean of MIT's Sloane School of Business Administration, who
postulates that "No country can become rich without a century of good
economic performance and a century of very slow population growth" (cited
in Lind 1995). In other contexts, Paul Krugman (1994) observes that
"Economic growth that is based on expansion of inputs, rather than on
growth in output per unit of input, is inevitably subject to diminishing
returns." Robert Stein in Investors Business Daily, states that
immigration dilutes the amount of capital available per job and thus undercuts
the mechanism for raising labor productivity and non-inflationary wage increases
(Stein 1995).

Ecologists attempt to appeal to the business community by pointing out that
population growth makes more environmental regulation necessary and adds
dramatically to the fiscal burden of local and state government. The more
general arguments, that population growth threatens the carrying capacity, and
immigration depresses the wages of American labor (very often the least skilled,
already disadvantaged, are hurt most) seem more attuned to classical liberal
thinking.

The competing rationales and outcomes appear reasonable or not depending upon
one’s perspective. Entrepreneurs hear restrictions on immigration as
interference with free markets and the economies of low-wage labor —although
an imported labor force displaces Americans who may then go on the public dole.
Moreover, low-skill immigrants and their families are very likely to depend on
public assistance (especially during months of slack employment), lack health
care insurance, and have children who are educated at public expense (Matloff
1998; Huddle 1998). Calls for government programs to correct poverty are an
almost inevitable result of importing poverty.

The radical-left element of the romanticist school hears immigration
restriction as racist (Political Ecology Group 1998). Racism is inferred because
reduced immigration would inevitably cut most from the largest streams of
immigrants, which are from the third world and the former USSR. Further,
one-world romanticists cast the attempt to conserve a unique American culture as
illegitimate —although all nations, as a matter of course, intend to conserve
their own language, history, traditions, and values. The charge of
"racism" has successfully intimidated large numbers of Americans whose
goals are conservationist and certainly not racist. I observe that the term,
"Nazism," is being substituted as "racism" loses credibility
and punch.

Conservationists place a high priority on the quality of life in their
communities, and their goals encompass preserving good opportunity for coming
generations of Americans. Most Americans look to the future. In the present,
wishing to protect American workers from having their wages competed down to
third world standards, citizens seek a healthful, open environment and
minimization of government intrusion into their lives. The majority sees no need
to reject the traditional culture, which is not only their birthright but also
the safeguard of democratic government and Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.

Every country has its interests and its culture. The culture evolves from
within as most citizens wish it to do. Such has been the course of history. In a
healthful state, the culture promotes a rate of growth, or stasis, where the
natural environment sustainably supports the associated society at a level that
is expected and acceptable to its citizens.

But romanticists deny the importance of both limits and western culture and,
for the sake of a one-world, internationalist chimera in which everyone is
equal, would see everyone poor. This cannot be right. The moral high ground must
have a basis in environmental and human possibilities. Disrespect for the
carrying capacity is destabilizing. It exacts, ultimately, a devastating toll.